When the Lights Go Out

by Mary Kubica

  One by one I click on the images and they tell me everything I need: when and where the child went missing; the color of their eyes, their hair, how old they would be. There are age-progressed photos, though how accurate they are, I don’t know. Ivy Marsh went missing at the age of two. She was last seen in Lawton, Oklahoma, a little girl with blue eyes, blond hair, dimples like me. Kristin Tate went missing on her third birthday, last seen in Wimberly, Texas. She too has dimples.

  I scroll down the page and click the arrow, move to the second page, and then the third. The fourth. “What are you looking for?” Liam asks, glancing over my shoulder to see what I see.

  “I don’t know,” I say, but then I take it back, telling him that what I’m looking for is me. I take in the age-progressed photos of children who went missing nearly twenty years ago, wondering if any of them might look like me. Though I tell myself that an age-progressed image of an infant wouldn’t have the same accuracy as that of an older kid because of how the face changes over the years. All babies have big, round eyes, chubby cheeks. Enormous foreheads. Toothless grins. There’s nothing distinguishable about them. They all look the same to me. So who’s to say what a baby’s face would look like in twenty years?

  And it doesn’t matter anyway because scanning the missing children, not one bears a resemblance to me.

  I push the laptop away. I reach into my bag and for the first time show the photograph to Liam. He asks who it is and I say, “Just some guy,” though I feel in my gut that there’s more to it than that. Because of some primal instinct to be close to this man, to know who he is. I tell Liam where I found the photograph, hidden in the cubbyhole behind the closet mirror.

  “You think he’s your father?” he asks, both a question and a statement. I shrug. He takes the photograph into his hands, holds it closely to his eyes, examining it before he slips the photograph back into my hands. My hands still shake, the tremor that for all these days won’t go away. The room goes quiet, all except for the steady beat of rain against the window. It’s a drizzle only, not a complete washout, though the day outside is ugly and gray. The morning’s beautiful sunrise has been clouded over now; it’s long gone. The melody of rain on glass is calming. I find myself soothed by it, tuning out everything else but that sound, wanting to sing along with it somehow, like a song’s refrain.

  And then it happens again. My eyelids close. They do it against my will. My head slumps forward, my neck no longer able to hold it up. It lasts a second. Only a second.

  For one blissful second, I am asleep.

  But then a jolt of electricity tears through me and my head snaps to. I’m awake.

  “Jessie,” I hear. I see Liam’s hand fall to my knee. I turn to face him, his blue eyes so well-meaning. I’m overcome with a sense of belonging that I’ve rarely known before, only ever with Mom.

  He touches my hair and for a single moment, something inside me feels warm.

  He urges me to lie on his sofa. He offers up a pillow and a blanket, but I say no thanks. That I’m all right. “Jessie,” he argues, but I say it again. I’m all right, though we both know that’s not true.

  I excuse myself, pushing my body from the sofa as if I weigh three hundred pounds. In the bathroom I splash cold water on my face. I stare at my reflection in the mirror. My skin has a grayish-green tint to it. I look sick, like I’m dying. My eyes sink into their sockets, deep bags formed beneath each. I press a finger to them, watching as they sink and then swell. Sink and then swell. My lips are dry, chapped around the edges, blistered, my cheeks concave.

  I count the days on my fingertips. The days since I’ve been asleep.

  The longest anyone has gone without a drop of sleep is eleven days.

  I stare at my own sunken reflection, not able to make sense of what I see, but knowing that by this time tomorrow, I will be dead.

  eden

  September 23, 1997

  Egg Harbor

  I tried not to let the desperation get the best of me, too afraid of what I might do if it did. I tried hard to keep busy, taking on extra shifts at the hospital, working overtime because being at home, alone, threw me easily off balance and I didn’t like the feeling of being off balance, of being desperate, of feeling like I was losing control.

  My home, Aaron’s and my utopian cottage, quickly became a dystopia to me, a place where everything was undesirable and sad, and where I was in a constant state of dysphoria; I couldn’t stand to be there and so I took to keeping myself out of the home all day, every day, doing everything imaginable to avoid the pine floors and whitewashed walls, the glorious tree swing that had once deceived me into believing this place was home.

  I spent ten hours a day reading through patient files, trying to decipher what they were to be billed for and entering it into the hospital’s system. It was meaningless and mundane, and yet a wonderful way to waste time. I took odd jobs on occasion, answering ads for a temporary cleaning lady or a dog walker or a driver to take a sweet elderly woman for dialysis treatments, keeping her company for the four hours it took to eliminate waste from her blood three times each week. It kept me busy and more than anything, I needed to be busy.

  Time passed.

  Last week I came home to find a separation agreement in a manila envelope, set beside the front door. In it, Aaron left me the house and all of our assets, taking from me only the debt, as much as he could anyway, the credit cards that were in both of our names.

  Even in divorce he was protecting me.

  I signed the paperwork post-haste, knowing that the sooner I did, the sooner the divorce was complete, I could ask for donor sperm without Aaron’s consent.

  In the meantime, I did everything I could to keep busy, knowing it would take months, nearly six of them, until the divorce was finalized.

  Could I wait that long for a baby?

  Oh, how I would try.

  But as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

  Because the minute the well ran dry and I found myself with nothing better to do, I drove by the quaint dance studio on Church Street and sat on the park bench, watching the little ballerinas come and go, and it was different now because I hadn’t been there in months, since springtime, but everything was still the same. The bigger girls scurried out of the studio first, followed by their mothers, who carried coffee and talked.

  And then, just when I’d begun to think that was it, the end of the procession, there came little Olivia with her short legs lagging behind, waylaid by things like heavy doors and sidewalk cracks, struggling to keep up. Her hair had been cut short, no longer in a bun but pinned to the sides of her head with barrettes. She was still easily distracted, that I’d come to learn, sidetracked by things like birds and bugs and today a leaf, bright red on the white concrete, the first indication of fall.

  She paused to poke and prod at it as if it were alive, examining the redness of the leaf, the shape of its lobes, while the others gravitated away at their own pace so that the distance between them grew exponentially, and this time, Olivia’s mother was too caught up in her conversation that she didn’t see her daughter on her haunches, examining the leaf with the concentration and single-mindedness of a microbiologist. The woman’s feet hit the street and she crossed the intersection, unaware of the fact that she and her child were now separated by a highway, the very same highway that once took a little girl’s life when her mother was also not watching.

  Some women were not meant to be mothers.

  And some who were, some who would make the very best mothers, were refused the right.

  It didn’t seem fair.

  Oh, what a good mother I would be, if only the universe would let me.

  Suddenly Olivia’s eyes peered up from the fallen leaf and, at seeing that she was alone, she began to cry. It was a process that went by degrees, a feeling of excitement first at finding the leaf, followed by
frustration that there was no one around to show the leaf to, before sadness crept in, a great heartache that the others had left without her, leading to panic. Sheer panic. Olivia gasped first, choking unexpectedly on her own saliva, and then she began to cry, quiet tears, choked-up tears, while her little knees shook beneath their shiny white tights.

  I’d be remiss to say that a series of thoughts didn’t move swiftly through my mind.

  How would I hide her?

  Where would we go?

  What would I call her? Because surely if she was a missing child, she couldn’t parade around town as Olivia still. She’d have to be something else.

  I leaned forward from the bench to lift the leaf from the concrete and asked if she ever collected leaves and pressed them between the pages of a heavy book. The sound of my voice, the sight of her leaf in my hand, gave her pause. Her eyes rose from the earth and landed on my smile, and for a moment there was a cessation of tears as I extended the leaf toward her and she took it from me with a shaky hand.

  I rationalized in my mind that it would be Aaron’s fault if I took the child—not mine, no, not ever mine—because that was the name of the game these days: blame.

  If only he had shown up at the fertility clinic...

  If only he hadn’t walked out of my life...

  He and I still would have a chance at our own child.

  I wouldn’t have had to take one that wasn’t mine.

  “Why are you crying?” I asked, though of course I knew the reason why. I remained seated, not wanting to scare her by standing tall and towering over her small frame. Outside, the temperatures were dropping again, fall drawing near. Soon the tourists would leave. On her arms there were goose bumps as loose strands of dishwater hair clung to the puddles of tears.

  “Where’s Mommy?” she asked, eyes searching the street. But only I heard it in the distance: the sound of girls’ laughter over the sound of the wind. Olivia didn’t hear.

  Through the trees I could barely make out the red sleeve of a cardigan, the pink of a tutu, a length of brown hair.

  “You lost your mommy?” I asked and, extending my own hand to hers, said, “Would you like for me to help you find her? Would you like for me to help you find your mother?

  “It’s okay,” I said when she hesitated. “I won’t hurt you.”

  It would be a lie to say she took my hand with ease, that she didn’t stare at it for a minute, overthinking, some disquisition about not talking to strangers coursing through her mind.

  But then she did take my hand, slipping it inside. It was a great shock to my system to feel this small, soft hand within mine, and it was all I could do not to squeeze tight with instinct, knowing that might make her scream. I didn’t want Olivia to scream. I didn’t want to scare her, but more so, I didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. For all intents and purposes, this was how it should be. I was hers and she was mine.

  And then I began to lead her in the opposite direction of where her mother had disappeared. The direction of my car.

  Olivia stopped, peering the other way over her shoulder—even a young girl could remember which way her mother had last been walking—but I said to her not to worry, that if we took the car we might find her mother more quickly than if we walked.

  I pointed to my car in the distance. “It’s right there,” I said.

  She thought about this a moment, standing frozen on the pavement, hemming and hawing, eyes moving back and forth from me to the car. A band of clouds had rolled in, blocking the earth from the sun, and as it did, the wind picked up its speed, chasing the warm day away. Outside, the temperature dropped by as many as five degrees and the day turned gray.

  Fall was coming; fall was here.

  “Well, that’s okay,” I said then, letting go of her hand. “If you don’t want to find your mother, we don’t need to,” and it was reverse psychology, of course, making her believe that if she didn’t get in the car with me, I might just leave her behind.

  I didn’t want to scare her, and yet there was no other way.

  I was only doing what I needed to do.

  I reasoned that we would only drive to the next town and then stop for ice cream. That I’d have her just long enough to teach her mother a lesson. Then I’d return her. Certainly I wasn’t planning to steal the child, because that’s not the type of person that I am. A kidnapper and a thief. I only wanted to borrow her for a while, like a library book on loan. To satisfy my craving for the time.

  I had taken no more than two steps away when I heard Olivia’s tiny feet scurrying quickly on the concrete, running after me. It worked.

  Her hand reached up, and she grabbed a hold of mine, squeezing tightly, careful not to let go. I smiled at her and she smiled back, the tears evaporating quickly from her cheeks.

  “Your mother must be here somewhere,” I said then, and we walked that way, hand in hand, for a good ten feet or more. We moved slowly—at Olivia’s pace, though I wanted to tug on her hand and run—and still, it took twenty seconds or less to traverse those ten feet. But in those twenty seconds I convinced myself that in some minute, negligible way, we looked alike, Olivia and me, though in reality we didn’t. We looked nothing alike.

  I wondered if, once she and I were sitting across from one another at a local diner, eating strawberry sundaes with whipped cream on top, I’d ever be able to return her to her mother.

  And then a new thought crossed my mind. I could drive farther south, south of Sturgeon Bay, south of Sheboygan, south of Milwaukee. We could live somewhere else, far away from here, where people might believe that we were mother and child.

  They would have no reason not to believe.

  I’d rename her. I’d call her something other than Olivia.

  And in time, she’d come to think of it as her given name.

  “I don’t have a booster seat,” I said as we approached the car, “but that’s okay for now. The seat belt will do just fine.” And as we closed in on the car I extended a hand toward the handle, reaching out to open the back door for Olivia to climb through. “It will only be a short drive after all,” I promised her. “I’m sure your mother is here somewhere.”

  In a single moment, I thought this through. I made a plan and it went like this. Once Olivia was in the car I would speed off the opposite way, far from town, away from her mother, not stopping until we’d passed Sturgeon Bay. There I would stop only to buy Olivia ice cream, something to soothe her, to make her not be scared, to quiet her certain tears. Ice cream and a stuffed bear or a toy from a gas station store, something she could clutch to her chest to make her feel safe. We’d drive all night, as far as we could go. Far away from here.

  And that’s when I heard it.

  Olivia’s name screamed urgently, emphatically through the cold air.

  It was a high-pitched screech, whiny like a whistle. A distressed sound. What followed were the footsteps of a stampede, thousands of wildebeests running down the street. That’s what it sounded like anyway, and as I peered up, hand still six inches away from the door, I saw Olivia’s mother and her herd hurrying toward me, eight ladies with seven little ballerinas in tow, shouting commands.

  “Olivia, come here right now.

  “What do you think you’re doing?

  “Get your hands off my child!”

  My hands grew slick. My heart beat quickly, more quickly than it was already beating. Under my arms there was wetness. Sweat. My head suddenly hurt. My brain thought quickly to manufacture a lie, as one of the ladies pointed at me and said, “I’ve seen you around here before,” and I ransacked my mind for words, any words, but the words wouldn’t come. My mind was holding them captive, detaining my words from me, though what it did do was measure the distance—computing the distance from the ladies to me, the distance from me to the car—doing the math, figuring it out, whether I could get Olivia inside th
e car before her mother and the other ladies reached us.

  I could, I decided. But there needed to be no hesitation.

  I needed to go.

  Go!

  I needed to go now.

  But my feet wouldn’t work properly, and my hand, slick with sweat, let go of Olivia’s hand and suddenly she was running in the wrong direction, running toward her mother and away from me and away from the car.

  “Who in the hell do you think you are?” Olivia’s mother asked pointedly as she gathered Olivia into her arms and hoisted her to her chest. “What did you think you were doing with my child?”

  And though I was completely tongue-tied, it was Olivia who did the speaking for me, who struggled in her mother’s arms to be set free and there, once her feet were firmly planted back on the concrete while twirling her red leaf in her hand, she said, “You forgot me, Mommy.”

  And with that she took six tiny steps away from her mother’s reach and extended her leaf to me. A parting gift.

  I took it in my hand. “She was helping me find Mommy,” Olivia crooned, smiling a toothless grin, but still, I could muster no words.

  And then Olivia’s mother changed tact, and her tone softened. The lines of her face disappeared and instead of reprimanding me or calling the police, as one of the ladies in the backdrop suggested she do, she thanked me. She thanked me. She thanked me for helping Olivia. Her cheeks turned red and her eyes filled with tears, and in that moment she believed were it not for me, she may have lost her child.

  “You should keep a better eye on your daughter,” I threatened, my voice and hands shaking like the leaves in the trees, clinging to their branches for dear life.

  eden

  May 11, 2016

  Chicago

  I sit on the front stoop, hands pressed between my knees to curb their shaking. I stare expectantly down the street, searching for that first glimmer of yellow to come bobbing along, the school bus, with Jessie on it. I check the time on my watch, knowing down to the minute what time the school bus arrives, but not having the tenacity to wait another three, because if I have to wait much longer I might get cold feet.